IBM HR first piloted HiRo in the second quarter of 2022, for IBM Consulting in North America. In previous quarters, for each employee manager, it took about eight hours to gather all of the necessary data and fill in the relevant nomination forms. Approximately 1,800 managers used HiRo during the Q2 2022 pilot, and they completed the data-gathering and data-entry work in about 1 hour each, collectively saving about 12,000 hours in that quarter’s promotions process.
The time savings, of course, greatly accelerated the promotions process for the quarter. “We did the work of ten weeks in five weeks,” says the IBM HR Business Partner.
Based on this success, HiRo has some growth opportunities of its own. It’s about to be rolled out to other IBM Consulting regions worldwide. “We anticipate that the other regions where we roll this out will achieve similar results. The potential savings over four quarters could be 50,000 hours per year,” says Jon.
Beyond saving time, HiRo and other digital workers’ highest value may be their potential to transform jobs. We are in the midst of a global labor and talent shortage. People are expected to do more with less all the time. This technology can help. “It’s not just that the work of four people can be done by one, it’s also that that one person's role is totally changed,” says Jon. “They can spend a much greater portion of their time on the most strategic work—like workforce planning and equity, and they can use IBM watsonx Orchestrate to supply the data they need to do that important work.”
So what’s next? While HiRo itself will be rolled out to more regions in late 2022, it is about to gain several digital colleagues. The HR department is already using learnings from the promotions cycle to develop new digital workers for other processes. The new prototypes include an Onboarding Assistant and Learning Event Manager, and more processes are in the pipeline for evaluation.